From the text: The Manifesto has already received strong criticism from an array of commentators, but none of these assessments has yet critiqued it from the perspective of “degrowth,” which is an approach that sees the transition to sustainability occurring through less environmentally impactful economic activities and a voluntary contraction of material throughput of the economy, to reduce humanity’s aggregate resource demands on the biosphere. From a degrowth perspective, technology is not viewed as a magical savior since many technologies actually accelerate environmental decline. With these disagreements in mind, a group of over fifteen researchers from the degrowth scholarship community has written a detailed refutation of the Ecomodernist Manifesto. . .
Authors and Endorsers: Jeremy Caradonna, Iris Borowy, Tom Green, Peter A. Victor, Maurie Cohen, Andrew Gow, Anna Ignatyeva, Matthias Schmelzer, Philip Vergragt, Josefin Wangel, Jessica Dempsey, Robert Orzanna, Sylvia Lorek, Julian Axmann, Rob Duncan, Richard B. Norgaard, Halina S. Brown, Richard Heinberg > Full article
Recently, an article on degrowth appeared in Harvard Business Review (hereafter HBR). Rather than offering a critique of capitalism, the article proposes that degrowth may not be a threat to business after all, and in fact, there are burgeoning degrowth markets waiting to be tapped into by the risk averse. Although we applaud the authors in getting the word “degrowth” into the illustrious pages...
Gemüsekooperative Rote Beete [Vegetable Cooperative „Rote Beete“] from Marc Menningmann on Vimeo. What has agriculture to do with the climate? A lot. Modern, industrialized agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. This video shows an excursion which took place in the context of the Degrowth Conference in Leipzig last year. Participants visited the vegetable cooperative "Rote Beete" o...
By Chris Ward Growth is always a goal in many countries, statistics appear everywhere and it’s always discussed. Even small reductions in GDP are met with bitter disappointment; it’s become one of the most important measures in the modern era. And yet there are surprisingly few discussions or resources on when and why this did happen. The special session on degrowth and history sheds some ligh...
